Dorothy Poon.com

The Marshmellow Test

3 January 2009 3 Comments

What is your marshmellow? I was first exposed to this phrase during a talk in the last quarter of 2008.

Some excerpts from the above linked article:The character traits highlighted by The Marshmallow Test persist in adult life. They effect our performance in every area. Once you start looking for them, it’s easy to spot the “marshmallows” in our professional — and personal — lives. They are the activities which give us immediate gratification — but undermine longer-range benefits.

The desire to please everyone is a “marshmallow” for the manager who let’s herself be “interrupt-driven” . To get those immediate smiles or words of praise, she spends the better part of each day responding to random requests to do this or that, help this person or that one — and never gets around to pursuing her own projects. She needs to occasionally shut the door, have the calls screened, and focus on the greater gratification of achieving long-range goals.

The current “cash cow” may be a “marshmallow” for the CEO who just wants to continue milking profits from “what’s always worked and is still working for us.” In failing to push his people to explore new products and services, he may undermine the organization’s capacity to keep its edge in the future.

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Successful people have developed habits which overcome the marshmallow temptation: Self-Restraint, Focus, Prioritizing, the Long-Range View. The marshmallow test is a telling way to catch people’s attention for a presentation on these strategies, which are so essential to success.

Suffice to say, ever since then, or rather, ever since then I have been aware of how I have been administering my own variation of the Marshmallow Test, and of course taking it in some form of another in different situations. I’ve watched as we’ve failed, I’ve watched as we’ve stumbled, I’ve watched as we’ve passed the test. It’s funny, but I probably scored higher on this test as a child and a teenager.

Conspicuously absent from this site will be the resolution list for 2009, either the to-do list, or the stop-doing list. Let’s just say that it always helps to know exactly what you want (or what you don’t want)…because how else would you be able to recognize it if it were right in front of you?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.”

– Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities.

My favourite quote of the moment – Only when we are no longer afraid; do we begin to live